How should Greens respond to Corbyn?

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Jeremy Corbyn has been elected Labour
leader with a stonking great majority. He
arrives with a vast mandate from a bigger membership than any UK
party has had in the modern age. The political year which started
with Scotland's independence referendum has ended with an event
perhaps just as extraordinary.

I'm a member of the Green Party. And
for Greens, this presents a challenge. On the one hand, many members
are delighted to see someone they have marched alongside over the
years as leader of the opposition. On the other, the party's strategy
in recent years has at least in part been to occupy space vacated by
Labour. A huge proportion of those who joined the party during the
Green Surge did so because they saw the Greens as “the only party
left on the left”. Clearly, that's no longer true.

With this in mind, here are some
thoughts on how Greens should respond.

1) Embrace the joy

It's
easy for Greens to look at Jeremy Corbyn and feel a little like
François
Englert must feel watching Peter
Higgs: “those were our ideas too, how come he's getting all the
credit?”. Similarly, it's tempting to sneer: Corbyn might be left,
but his ideas represent the past, not the future.

This is the wrong approach. The
election of Jeremy Corbyn brings an anti-establishment voice to the
front bench and profile to a range of issues Greens have long
campaigned on. It's a stab in the eye, foot, knee and cheek for the
neoliberal consensus and that's all to the good. It's easy to sit
moping in the corner muttering snide remarks about how the music's
terrible and everyone's gonna wake up with a hangover, but since when
was that a good way to make friends?

In particular,
Corbyn will face a brutal assault from the forces of the
establishment for as long as he remains leader. Greens shouldn't join
in the kicking, but show some solidarity. The Greenwich Greens
demonstrated perfectly here.

2) "Yes, and"; not “but, but, but”

Corbyn and the
Green Party agree on a huge amount, including perhaps their
respective most popular policies: opposing austerity and
privatisation. However, Greens have much more to add to this: ideas
for the future like basic income, giving workers the right to turn
their companies into co-ops, democratising the energy system from the
bottom up, participatory budgeting, land reform and land value tax,
and so on.

These aren't
proposals that Corbyn would necessarily oppose (he's said he's
interested in a social wage – which is a similar idea to a basic
income). And so the tone shouldn't be moral outrage at the failure of
the Labour party to adopt these ideas, but rather, “yes, and”:
“yes, it's great that Labour now has a leader who opposes
austerity, and let's get serious about abolishing poverty with
an unconditional basic income”.

For the last five
years, Greens have had to start pretty much every conversation by
making a case against austerity. Scottish Green co-convener Maggie
Chapman was even asked by the BBC how the government would pay for
her proposal that the minimum wage be raised to a living wage: a
measure which would in fact bring money into the Exchequer. With
Labour now likely to articulate this argument, Greens have cover to
explain more radical policies – a position which has helped the
party to rally support in Scotland during the referendum. This is an
excellent opportunity, one that the party should embrace.

3) The future is about radical
democracy

Radical democracy
is one of the Green Party's four founding principles, and it's an
area on which Corbyn is a little weak. He comes from a relatively
economistic tradition which sees progressive politics as about
redistributing wealth, but talks less about political power. He's
luke-warm on PR, opposes Scottish independence and seems to have
little to say about, for example, regional assemblies in England.

Redistributing
wealth is vital. But, as Neal Ascherson has said (also quoted
by Anthony Barnett this weekend), you can no more get democratic
socialism from the British State than you can get milk from a
vulture. Britain is a collection of rocks in the North Atlantic run
by a system designed to control the biggest empire in human history.
Until that changes, little else will.

Corbyn has said,
when pushed, that he supports the idea of a constitutional convention
from opposition. Greens should enthuse him about that to ensure that
it happens, and then collaborate with it as much as possible. Such a
convention, properly run, has the capacity to release vast energy in
England and to turn a temporary wave into a permanent shift in the
democratic structure of this country.

Deep down, people
know that British politics isn't fit-for-purpose. The first ever
Green Party national campaign, in the 1990s, was “the Campaign for
Real Democracy”. Perhaps it's time to launch this again.

4) Prepare for different futures

Politics is
clearly changing. Making confident assertions about what will happen
next is like using a road map in space. Almost no one predicted that
this would happen, and so almost no one can reasonably claim to be
sure about what will happen next. Greens should be flexible,
solidaristic, joyous, honest and friendly, not snide, bitter or
know-it-all. If Corbyn or a similar successor (Lisa Nandy and Clive
Lewis are obvious potentials) is the Labour candidate for Prime
Minister in 2020, then the party should be prepared to form an
electoral pact – as Caroline
Lucas has proposed, and which Elliot Folan has looked
at in more detail.

One
of the big failings, in retrospect, of the Greens this year was not
managing to persuade the SNP to agree a Westminster electoral pact.
The idea that the Greens would stand down in all but, say, two seats,
and the SNP would stand down in those was widely discussed on both
sides before the election, but didn't eventually happen.

The
Scottish Green vote in two of the three seats the SNP didn't win –
Edinburgh
South and Dumfriesshire,
Clydesdale and Tweeddale – was bigger than the winning margin,
whilst Greens failed to make any significant gains. What-ifs are
always difficult, it seems likely that such a deal could have
delivered an extra Green MP or two, and ensured that neither Labour
nor the Tories held any seats in Scotland.

On the other hand,
if Corbyn is deposed at some point in the next five years, the
Parliamentary Labour Party refuses to nominate anyone similar to run
as a successor, and Labour runs in 2020 with a leader from the centre
or right of the party, then Greens need to have built a lifeboat
capable of carrying the vast hopes of the movement that has emerged
out of Labour and into that election.

5) Prepare for next year's
election

2016 brings a
series of vital elections in Britain: London, Wales, Scotland,
Bristol, Liverpool, Sheffield and Northern Ireland if the Assembly
manages to limp that far (which is looking less and less likely).

Most of these
votes take place in systems other than first past the post: the
Mayoralties with a supplementary vote system, and Scotland and Wales
with the additional member system. In London, a “Sian then Khan”
campaign seems an obvious way forwards. The idea that Liverpool's
Labour Mayor Joe Anderson is the progressive candidate in that race
will be difficult to sustain, irrespective of what his party leader
says. Bristol is a whole different ball game, and that's before we
even think about Scotland.

6) Don't retreat from the left

The simple and
obvious lesson of Corbyn's victory is that left wing ideas are back.
For Greens to retreat into a narrow eco-liberalism now would be an
absurdity. The best electoral chances for Greens lie either in
mopping up the Corbyn support after a Labour coup or in an electoral
pact with a Corbynite candidate for PM.

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